Pentagon spokesman Admiral John Kirby appeared on Morning Joe today to walk back Barack Obama’s contention that we don’t have “a complete strategy” against ISIS yet — after a full year of ISIS territorial gains and genocide in Iraq and Syria.  Kirby said that we “absolutely” have a strategy, but offered up aspirational goals rather than the plan to achieve them:

“We do have a strategy, the president was referring to a specific plan to improve training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces,” department spokesman John Kirby said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Kirby told the panelists that the strategy covers “ends, ways and means.”

“The ends are very clear, we’ve said this all along, the goal is to degrade and defeat ISIL, to remove them as a threat in the region and frankly, around the world. The ways we are going to do that are through obviously airstrikes. We have to train and equip Iraqi Security forces, this is their fight on the ground. We have to stem the flow of foreign fighters,” he said, using the administration’s preferred acronym for ISIS.

Interestingly, Kirby answered a skeptical question about air strikes by acknowledging that air power alone won’t “degrade and destroy” ISIS. Kirby tells the panel that they are relying on “competent Iraqi security forces,” in which he admitted that the training and equipping of the forces has not produced the results promised.

Bob Woodward scoffs a bit at the strategy as it has been explained thus far. “Let’s face it, Obama does not like war,” Woodward says, and it’s leading to a too-passive approach. The “mantle of the humble superpower” will not allow the US to defeat groups like ISIS; it will take a much more aggressive strategy, one which the President won’t adopt. That’s a reality that the announced “strategy” can’t bridge, no matter how much “strategic patience” Kirby urges, to the consternation of the MSNBC panel.

Meanwhile, John Boehner wants Americans to know that he’s been asking for a complete strategy against ISIS from the White House for a very, very long time. In this video released earlier by the Speaker’s office, Boehner says, “‘Hope’ is not a strategy.” Neither is strategic patience in service to an utterly unrealistic approach to the kind of threat ISIS poses.